welcome to so if we could visionaries shevardnadze humanity has been searching for the seeds of consciousness of the years well i guess today believes we might finally be on the pass to finding them i'm joined by dr stuart hammer of anesthesiologist and director of the center for consciousness studies. dr stuart hamer us anna says ya just iraq sure of center for consciousness studies it's really great to have you here with us today consciousness is like one of my favorite topics so i can't wait to dig into your brain so you said that some concepts of consciousness are night while concepts and why are they naive. most people would say that the brain is a computer of neurons acting as bits like individual on off states and that if you get sufficient complexity in competition that consciousness emerges but really

there's no evidence for that that consciousness is an emergent property of computation it's an assumption that the brain is a computer but there's no evidence for that and i think it's a it's a poor assumption for example it assumes that each neuron is a simple on off switch yes or no but a single cell neurons or cells in a single cell like a paramecium swims around finds through defines a mate has sex can learn it escapes from a capillary tube faster and faster it's intelligent it may not be conscious but it's intelligent so if a single paramecium or even an amoeba which can solve problems can be that intelligent why should we think that a neuron is just a one or is 0 so i think we need to go deeper inside the neuron she to another level and figure out how the paramecium does it and that turns out to be using structures called microtubules inside all cells including brain cells neurons that

are capable it seems a processing information and maybe quantum computers and we have to get to my car to phyllis but before i have just a couple of questions because since you're setting consciousness i want to understand from what side you're sort of starting to beginning to learn it because science is a method of learning about the world by measurements experiment and consciousness can be really measured so why mess and why does scientists bother because i mean there is no institute that is actively researching the whereabouts of god for instance because that's a matter of belief why bother with consciousness isn't it also a matter of belief. well i'm conscious i see your conscious it's true we can't measure it but one thing we do know it goes away under anesthesia and comes back when the patient wakes up from in a seizure and my approach has been by looking at how anesthesia works to

selectively in reverse simply prevent consciousness the brain is still active under anesthesia we use the boat potentials where we stimulate the leg or the arms and record from the brain or we stimulate the brain and record motor signals so the brain is functioning it's processing information a consciousness is missing so that's the approach that i take if we can figure out how in is the ship's selectively blocks consciousness without affecting other functions of the brain that would tell us what consciousness is and that's what i've done for most of my career study how anesthesia selectively and recursively prevents consciousness so when you say it once again i want to dig deeper when you were a cave anesthetics at than the consciousness is a raised what happens when we come out of the anesthetics point when and when it dissipates is it like what do get like a whole new consciousness or is it like

a switch on and off like you put on a t.v. or what happens to the consciousness well it depends on what how you believe that the anesthetic works but however it works that the gases are grieved and so long as into the blood and go to the whole body including the brain and go into the brain and act only by a very weak quantum forces they don't form chemical bonds like other drugs they form only very weak quantum interactions. and when you turn off the vaporizer and turn off the gas they float out of a brain and into the lungs and then out and when you remove them consciousness resume. and it's the same you because you have memory and you have yourself and a resume so your consciousness is kind of in in suspension or it's inhibited by your memories and everything that makes out you yourself is it usually cause is

still there and then resumes is the same question can be acted as why you're the same person from moment to moment and it's because of memory and your the self which is from a way hardwired in the brain and actually there's good evidence that memories encoded in microtubules in their consciousness is happening in the same the same medium that consciousness occurs so what about that like really complex brain surgeries that uses anesthetic which is not shut in consciousness down when a patient speaks to doctors touring the procedure with on the senses being unarmed but not awareness what happens to consciousness then. yeah well if you're talking about neurosurgery brain surgery while the patient's away few can respond which is if you want to be very careful that you don't disturb something important and just want to take out the tumor or the bad tissue and then you do it under local

anesthesia that's not general anesthesia you numb up the scalp you know muck the. the layers that going down to the skull the perry asked him around the skull and then the men in g.'s the lining of the brain but then once you get into the brain the brain actually doesn't doesn't sense pain so in those cases that's not general anesthesia that's what we call local anesthesia just around the area where the a hole is where the certain kind of you can approach and the patient is still awake so that's not that's not really anesthesia that's what we call a local anesthesia so that my that i still don't get it what happens to consciousness when it's i under anaesthetic you're so if you're saying we don't really erase consciousness where does it go while you're under influence like in your own words in fact really simple where it's what happens to consciousness while you're asleep or staring under anesthesia it's kind of like sleep also except under

when you're sleeping you can dream so dream asleep or anesthesia consciousness unsuspended it's it's it's not it's not happening it's on bake a ship it's it's the it course it depends what causes consciousness which i think are quantum dipole oscillations and these quantum dipole out a solution stop at a certain frequency but the membranes and other activities continued so you can have brain function without consciousness. well 1st became a influence what happens to consciousness when you're drunk and like completely unaware of the fact that you're dancing house naked on a bar. i would know that but it depends on the drug and alcohol at lower concentrations is excited torrie it's disinhibiting you get happy and get ate and then if you keep drinking you you get sedated and can fall asleep other drugs psychedelics for example were the other way and increase increase your

level of consciousness and i think this relates to consciousness having a frequency having actually have a number of different frequencies kind of like music that are interval then and and resonate together and when you use alcohol 1st the frequency goes up and then it goes down and you become the surgical and and drug but before that you're all excited happy and giddy in the other and an anesthesia slows things down also it goes all the way and so much further than alcohol can and there's no corner oscillations nobody grayson's at all and you've slowed everything down and consciousness goes away the opposite would be psychedelic which increases the frequency and expands consciousness increases the awareness increases the depth of phenomenal experience by increasing the frequency. so alice peeking to henry marsh

i am sure you know who he is his the world renowned brain surgeon and i ask him whether he thinks consciousness exists and is like no i don't because i operate people every day open their eyes open their skulls and i know that there are billions of billions of neurons set are connected to each other in a very unique way and we can never know too much about them because it's impossible to really know all about those billions of neurons and each person in particular he goes said that is consciousness that is what we call consciousness the unknown connection of billions of neurons that each person has in its own way what would you say to his explanation that's the wrong explanation we can get interactions among neurons is is saying the brain is a computer neurons are no different than bits gates switches synapses switches and gates and if you get enough computation or enough complex today then you have

consciousness best of major assumption in neuroscience in artificial intelligence and there is an psychology but after all these decades of studying it they don't have a clue how they could produce consciousness and therefore you get these neal is that answers like you just said oh well it must not exist if i can explain it by the way i don't look at it it must not exist but they're looking at the wrong way they have to look at it at a deeper level where you get the quantum effects which give you consciousness i think quantum effects specifically in microtubules are necessary for consciousness . i also spoke to neurobiologist roberts of policy and he's thinking is that quite likely human behavior is biology not what we do our decisions and choices is if that is to be believed right what good is consciousness for i mean it really doesn't translate into free will but only serves to make us good at

executing our biological program. i don't agree with supposedly i like his work on other things but not on that and the problem is that if you look at just at what you can measure with electrical activity at the level of neurons and you and i are talking you say something and i answer your back immediately as best i can if you were to measure the activity in my brain the corresponds with what you said it happens after i respond so people will say suppose that i'm act i'm responding now i'm consciously and have a have an an illusion an illusion after the fact that i was in control now in the quantum approach we get around that because the quantum collapses can send quantum information backward in time so even only activity is going to happen at a fraction of a 2nd afterwards it goes backwards in time so that when i'm speaking i'm speaking

consciously my consciousness is in control so. what suppose he said would make consciousness and the epi phenomenon merely along for the ride and having an illusion of being in control and that's what most neuroscientists think because they look at the brain as a computer but if you look at the brain as a quantum quantum computer you can have backward information and therefore consciousness can happen in real time and you can be in it you can have free will in fact i have a paper called a quantum bio brain biology can rescue consciousness very well by this backward time back track granted break right now when we're back we'll continue talking to dr cyril tamar astana says a ologists and director of the center for consciousness studies talking about what is consciousness stay with us.

in the troubled 19 seventies a group of killers rampage through parts of northern ireland that was coordinated loyalists attacks particularly catholic population tens of thousands were forced to flee their homes a mob was striking to put these attacks was that the are you see the police actually took part in the attacks so instead of preventing it they were active participants in the burning of full streets in belfast at the hague more than a 100 innocent civilians were. as the review can seniors and we found out more i was surprised about the extent and its occurrence which the solution was involved

in some of those cases that killers would lead to be named. i think it went to the very very top i think it is. the water where all the patients you. give the go ahead.

now are back what doctors sure tamarac talking about what's consciousness stuart let's talk about the central point of your theory and that is our consciousness is born into so called microtubules what are they where are they located. they're all your cells there and all of neurons brain cells but also all you other cells and in fact they're found in all a living cells in animals and even plants and bacteria and and other similar has may have something very similar so they're there in all living systems basically and they are part of the cytoskeleton so they they supply bone white support to the cell and they also do things inside the cell for

example cell division they pull the chromosomes apart and create the daughter cells and and this has to be done perfectly or else you get. development or cancer so they do all these all highly organized orchestrated things and in neurons they establish the connections they establish the shape of the cell and they do things that seem to require intelligence which is what got me interested in them in the 1st place back in the seventy's i was studying cancer and looking at celebration and everybody else got interested in the genes in the chromosomes and i got interested in how these structures actually performed a dance almost and pulled the chromosomes apart they seem to have some intelligence and at that time it was discovered that there are also founded neurons are quite plentiful in durand's and since i was interested in consciousness i got the idea that might be processing information at that level and if you look at their structure they actually look like a computer or it like it like a matrix of states of units connected in

a lattice which can interact and can trust us information and i spent a lot of time looking at how they could trust this information going models and simulation and with businesses showing that they're capable at least theoretically of trust as an information and they do things that seem to require information so it's legible that they are not just the bony skeletal support of the cell but also the nervous system of the cell kind of like the brain of the nervous system within each cell. what makes you think that the process going on inside the microchip builds are actually consciousness and not something else right very good question so i spent about 20 years studying microchip the information processing going around to neural net nerve official intelligence meetings telling people that if they want to simulate the brain they've got to go much deeper than the level of neurons and each neuron has about

a 1000000000 tubular and subunits of microtubules which can oscillate and switch at about 10 megahertz so the standard approach an artificial intelligence of neuro science is that we have about $100000000000.00 nerve cells switching at about every $1000.00 sent apps is switching about $100.00 hertz something like that which gives you 10 to the 16th operations per 2nd so i'd assume you laird a neuroscientist henry markram and everybody said well if you can have a computer do 10 of the 16th operations per 2nd it will be conscious because that's what the brain is brain does and the brain produces consciousness therefore a computer like that would well we've already reached that in a dozen and but i didn't know why and i was one day in about 1990 somebody said to me it's ok let's say you're right and there's all this information trusses in going how would that explain consciousness how about explain

joy feelings the shade of blue paint in this entity all these feelings and emotions what's now known as the hard problem consciousness and i really didn't know but fortunately that person suggested i read a book by roger penrose called the emperor's new mind which attacked the idea that consciousness is a computation and he used girls' theorem and basically argued that something like understanding knowing something's right need something outside the system to prove it either mathematical proof or do. understanding something that computers are very good at brute force calculations and playing chess but they don't really understand anything so our rogered suggested there was something else that was required for a force for understanding and other types of feelings in consciousness and that he thought he said at that time was a type of collapse of the way function of quantum state reduction a solution to the measurement problem in quantum mechanics and when i read that i

was kind of blown away by it because it seemed so far afield to go from the brain to 2 and he said that these collapses were due to fluctuations in structure of the universe so that was seemed pretty strange but when i read it more and more it made sense it was logical and it was and still is the only actual mechanism proposed for consciousness other than emergence leading to complex computation and somehow consciousness happens roger said that when these types of collapses these types of quantum state reductions you do have ject or threshold object a reduction when nat happened and it's have that caused a moment of consciousness and that would be happening everywhere in the environment in a very low level but these moments of consciousness would be what he called kroto conscious because they wouldn't have any meaning they would have the self they would have the memory they would be random and just come and go and what he needed was something in the brain they could organize these objective reductions these these simple

primitive moments of consciousness there were didn't have any meaning and put them together and to give the kind of consciousness we have and i look at that as kind of like the oh are moments that are happening everywhere in the environment and something like they have they have claudia they have experienced something like if you go to the symphony and the orchestra is warming up and each decision is is tuning his or her instrument. so you hear this year all these sounds or noise but it but it's it's a constant a it's disorganized and then the band the orchestra plays and you get the music so what the brain does and what the microtubules do is is organize or orchestrate these quantum collapses use objective productions to give something like music so it's organize it has resonance it has meaning and and that's that's our theory

orchestrated objective reduction so wholly in the brain or in simple in other systems with microtubules do you get organized or orchestrated consciousness as opposed to consciousness being here there and everywhere but without meaning now. let's just say that that it seems weird to say that there's experience in quantum state reductions everywhere in the environment but most narrow a lot of merit scientists have resorted to can psychism because they can't explain consciousness by computation or complex city famous neuroscientist like christopher coke and and julio to noni and many others resort to pan psychism because their approach doesn't really work and so they say well there must be consciousness and everything and i would agree with that except it's not in the in the material it's in the collapse that that creates the state of that material it's a dynamic process of consciousness is actually at the sequence of events of

specific events that select states in reality and give and give moments of conscious consciousness. interlake any reliable way to actually see study what's going on inside those microchip both. yes there is and. first of all people by stating how anesthesia works that's one way and we have a proposal in for a grant to study quantum interference in microtubules so let me let me digress for a moment it was thought when we proposed quantum stuff in the brain people thought the brain is too warm wet and noisy it can't happen in biology because if you want to build a quantum computer in the lab you have to go to absolute 0 temperature but then they discover that in photosynthesis which plants use to make to make pseudo

that the photons from the sun are transferred to the area to make food by a process that involves quantum superposition so the energy is converted to electron states and goes through 7 in one protein goes through 7 different pathways the same time this is a quantum superposition of multiple possibilities and plants use that the trees i can see behind you are using it now even in the fading sunlight to make food using this quantum suit quantum coherence effect and ambient temperature so if a plant can do it then we thought our brains can do it and it turns out it's probably a very similar mechanism so we've proposed experiments at a very excellent laboratory who's done a lot of this quantum coherence of photosynthesis where to look for the effect of quantum interference in my particular case and if we get it then we're going to see if it goes away with the anesthesia and i think you're also saying that when the

brain stops functioning the information said the microchip is doesn't does a pair so where does it go and also how do we know that the information inside them does not disappear with a physical body. well when you wake up you still remember who you are and what you were doing and so forth and memory doesn't form under anesthesia but when you wake up you remember what you knew before and we think that memory is hardwired in the microtubules and we've shown how that could happen the memory is another mystery most people would say it's incentive aps is but the proteins that make up synopses only lasts hours hours to days and yet memories can last a lifetime so it has to be her heart and we think that that it's in the microtubule so in the in the system itself it's at 70 is wanted by gracious memory isn't coded and when you're under anesthesia they're inert or inactive but when you wake up in the vibration start again remember you're still there it never it never left it was

just inactive while you're unconscious. so you say that once we figure out once and for all what is consciousness and where it stems from in the brain will be able to upload consciousness into now turn a good medium what media like computer chips are like another human. it could be in a set of microtubules another set of microtubules or it could be in a system that operates like microtubules as a quantum computer which can have objective reduction threshold for salt fullerenes for example the c 60 molecules or that a nano tubes graphene these are all organic molecules that have the same high resident's electron. dipole oscillations that happen inside proteins so the only hope i think for uploading consciousness into an alternative reading medium would be something like a microchip goals which could be in fullerenes or some organic molecule search such

a pleasure talking to you and i hope we're seeing here add to soon rather than later where his consciousness where it stems from and what. it's been great talking about but your idea of what he represents and how he would meet soon again . ok so be great job you thank you so much by about. you know but you know here they are so being you. know yes for on

a. boy. or a. tree as they walked through it. it just came to be you know pretty good. oh yeah it's. so. good gave us to be there to get the word were the words for. the stories of men who can't imagine life without fashion without a sense of style without things that might be seen as weakness in this masculine world but they still demonstrate incredible strength of spirit to live as they choose. for.

throughout its history just with the self-proclaimed islamic states terrorist group have recruited up to 30000 foreigners from all over the world to fight for the. sounds of russian citizens left their country to join the terrorists often bringing wives and children with them. and if. you see me as and you could not. mourn you. hundreds of children and widows were held captive disappeared. back in russia those children families went search for.

say very modestly that i have done more for the african-american community than any president says abraham lincoln as the city could know she was engulfed in black lives matter protests we examine how politicians then use the unrest in this year's election campaign. to on the 1st anniversary of the death of. u.k. officials consider a virtual trial for the wife of a u.s. diplomat accused of killing him and then fleeing the country we speak to his grieving parents. she was the last person to risk it is absolutely clear now that the united states government does not have either a legal or moral doctor step-daughter.